The Proud Tower Read Online Free PDF Page B

Duchess, who died young in the eighties, was, in the words of Lord Ernest Hamilton, “divinely tall,… of a beauty so dazzling as to be almost unbelievable.” Her successor, the Countess of Warwick, “the prettiest married woman in London,” was inamorata of the Prince of Wales and the cause of a famous fracas in which Lord Charles Beresford almost struck his future sovereign. She shimmered before the eyes of a Society journal as “a goddess with a rounded figure, diaphanously draped, and a brilliant haughty beautiful countenance whose fame had penetrated to the dim recesses of the placid country.” She was a Beauty, a magic title of the time that conferred upon its bearer a public character. “Get up, Daisy,” cried her mother when their ship docked after a particularly seasick crossing of the Irish Channel which had left her prostrate, “the crowd is waiting to have a look at you.”
    In and out of Adam doorways in Berkeley and Belgrave Squares the constant procession flowed. No one unless dying ever stayed home. The day began at ten with a gallop in the Park and ended at a ball at three in the morning. At a select spot between the Albert and Grosvenor Gates in Hyde Park, a small circle of all the Society that counted was sure of meeting its members on a morning ride or a late afternoon drive between tea and dinner. London had not lost her Georgian air. Window boxes were bright with flowers in houses and squares lived in by the families whose names they bore: Devonshire House and Lansdowne House, Grosvenor Square and Cadogan Place. Splendid equipages filled the streets. Ladies driving their victorias, with a “tiger” sitting very straight with folded arms in the box, gave an extra flick of the whip to their high-stepping cobs as they passed under approving masculine gaze from club windows. Gentlemen sighed and told each other “what a pretty thing it was to see a lovely woman drive in London behind a well-matched pair.” Down another street came trotting the Royal Horse Guards in scarlet tunics and white breeches on black horses with bridles and halter-chains shining and jingling. Tall silhouettes of hansom cabs carried the well-known profiles of statesmen and clubmen on their round of visits to the great houses and to the clubs in Pall Mall and Piccadilly: the Carlton for Conservatives, the Reform for Liberals, the Athenaeum for distinction, the Turf for sportsmen, the Travellers’ or White’s, Brooks’s or Boodle’s for social converse with like-minded gentlemen. The business of government and empire went on in “the best club in London,” the House of Commons, which sat through the season. Its library, smoking room and dining room, its servants, waiters and wine cellars were of a quality befitting the profession of a gentleman. Ladies in wide hats and trailing skirts took tea with members and ministers on the terrace overhanging the Thames where they could look out on the episcopal dignity of Lambeth Palace across the river and gossip about political preferment.
    At private dinner tables draped in smilax, with a footman behind each chair, gentlemen in white tie and tails conversed with ladies in clouds of tulle over bare shoulders, wearing stars or coronets in their elaborately piled hair. Conversation was not casual but an art “in which competence conferred prestige.” At the opera, made fashionable by its most energetic patroness, Lady de Grey, Nellie Melba sang love duets in her pure angelic soprano with the handsome idol Jean de Reszke. In the Royal Box glowed a vision in low-cut velvet, Lady Warwick, with “only a few diamonds on her Mephistophelian scarlet dress” and a scarlet aigrette in her hair. A battle array of lorgnettes was raised to see what Lady de Grey, her rival as London’s best-dressed woman, was wearing. Afterwards at Lady de Grey’s parties, called “Bohemia in tiaras,” the guests might include Mme Melba herself and the Prince of Wales and—before his fatal year of